More Asteroids Could Hit Earth In The Upcoming Years

With the strike in Chelyabinsk, Russia this year, scientists say it’s time to get serious. Tom’s Hardware states that a couple of articles come to the conclusion that asteroid strikes will be more frequent. For those interested, the articles are published in Nature, one of the most prestigious academic journals.

The guys currently tracking asteroids look for the ones that could cause total disasters and end of human life as we know it scenario. Most asteroids we know of have 1 kilometer in diameter or more. But there are however smaller ones that could devastate cities and even countries, the only thing is that we don’t really know where they are and when they will strike.

A project with its goal set to detect much smaller threats has been formed, named B612, led by former astronaut Edward Lu. According to the project, there are a million “near-Earth asteroids large enough to substantially damage or destroy a major city.” Equivalent to a massive minefield of nuclear warheads, this is not a threat we can simply ignore.

Scenarios like the one at Chelyabinsk are likely to happen once in a decade or two. However, a large surface of the Earth is uninhabited and given that we have more water than land masses, the probability of asteroids hitting large cities is unlikely. But nobody can be certain of that fact.